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Available Linux 4.20 with STIPB allegedly corrected

Linux-4.6

Linus Torvalds announced yesterday the official and stable availability of Linux 4.20 , the latest version of the kernel that has become one of the most important pillars of computing thanks to the fact that it supports many large infrastructures, especially server.

Linux is a gigantic project at present, with tens of millions of lines of code and covering many different fronts, so in MuyLinux we will try to highlight only the most important. On this occasion and as almost always, there are developments that are of interest to the end user, especially those interested in AMD technology.

The first thing that is worth mentioning is the support for the graphics accelerators included in the Picasso and Raven 2 APU , in addition to having advanced in the support of the future Vega 20 GPUs. It is good to know that apparently you will not have to wait too many months to see the future graphics well supported in Linux. In addition, we also have improvements in the performance of GPUVM in AMDGPU (the free driver for "recent" GPUs of AMD) and acceleration of JPEG in VCN in the APU Raven Ridge if it is combined with Table 18.3 , since the version of the kernel driver used can condition to what extent we can squeeze the stack responsible for the graphic APIs . In CPU we find a very initial support of Zen 2.

On Intel and its IGPs, we find an advancement in the work to support the Ice Lake graphics accelerators (Gen 11) and full PPGTT support for the generations of Ivy Bridge, Haswell and Valleyview processors (the latter is included in models of Atom processors). As regards NVIDIA, obviously through Nouveau, highlights the support for HDMI 2.0 and initial screen support in the NVIDIA Xavier Tegra194 SoC.

As far as the processors are concerned, we have nested virtualization enabled by default in the AMD and Intel processors and a faster context change in IBM POWER9. However, the most important are the corrections introduced in the controversial patch STIBP against Specter v2 , which has been refined to the point of not impacting excess performance after uncovering the catastrophic consequences of its application a month ago.

Another aspect of interest is the file systems, especially EXT4, XFS and BTRFS, which are currently the referents. Of the first two we are only maintenance updates, while for the third have included improvements in performance. Added to this are other improvements that include MDRAID for RAID10 and the performance of FUSE, as well as new features for F2FS.

On peripherals oriented to the end user, we can highlight the vibration support for the control of the Xbox One S and a new driver for the Apple Trackpad 2. Yes, you can use a command of a mainstream console to play on GNU / Linux, so those who are used to your console command can try it on their favorite distribution to see if they have a satisfactory experience.

As we have already said, there are many things introduced and covering all of them in an article is impossible, so we leave a link to the page of Kernel Newbies dedicated to Linux 4.20 for those who want to have all the information with a more friendly disposition.

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